2. Block, tool, and first trials
To be honest, something triggered a negative spiral of emotions in me when I started working on the brief, and I felt stuck, unable to come up with anything, reflect on anything.
It started from: how would I show the quality of a whole that needs to be felt and can’t be explained, if I don’t know what to talk about? I’m not even sure what my project so far was about. It’s all unclear and I feel floating in the void. But I have to produce something and bring it for Tuesday. And it’s a decisive unit…
Fear and worries completely took over my mind, leaving no space for curiosity, creativity, trying, not to mention playing or having fun. I was paralysed, as the flood of emotions overwhelmed me and blocked any rational thinking. At the same time, kind of looking at it from a side, I felt guilty, and ashamed of all those feelings. Like I’m making a big deal out of nothing and don’t really have the right to feel them, that’s childish and incompetent.
I really didn’t want to go to tutorial, but knew at the same time that it would just make the problem worse, and prolong this whole situation. At some point, I found an equivalent of a temporary peace of mind in giving up and some kind of indifference.
…
I know well that those problems come from deep beliefs and internal stories, exactly the same ones that I talked about in one of my essays last term. In fact, I’m interested in them exactly because I experience them. The process that was going on here was strong projections. Those feelings didn’t come from the present, they came from the past, and I was reliving them in a new context, but reenacting old familiar patterns.
However uncomfortable or painful, I still find this process fascinating. And I thought that if it takes up all the space in my mind and blocks any other ideas, it could just as well serve as a material for the project, at least for a start.
It is a vague, overwhelming feeling, but breaking it to pieces, and pinning things down, naming them, gives me at least the feeling of knowing what’s going on and where it comes from.
…
On the previous term, at some point I got interested in mind mapping. Some features of mind maps:
- visually organise information
- show relationships among pieces of a whole
- explanatory
But I also found examples of mind maps like those (Martha Rich, Mind Maps) that are not clear, and have more of qualities like:
- evoking
- impression
- non-rational
- personal
…
I search ‘mind maps’, and found a number of softwares for online workshops and managing team work, picked one, and started making something.
3. Afraid of
4. Process
…
I see it’s something else to explain what fear is and where it comes from, and something entirely different to make someone ‘get it’, give the impression of what it feels like.
There is a great Polish song about fear that I think shows it beautifully (I translated it here)
Non-courage (Nieodwaga by Pustki)
Of dark gates
Of night trains
Of walking through the tramway tracks
Of howling dogs
Of walking under the ladder
Of fish bones in the throat
.
I’m telling myself it’s not fear
Because non-courage sounds better
.
Of quiet days
Of your coming back and leaving
Of going to sleep alone
Of lung cancer
Or that I’ll lose memory
And stop hearing
.
I’m telling myself it’s not fear
Because non-courage sounds better
So embarrassing to admit
I won’t say it aloud